Notes From Zone 4

We did a lot today, and I’m exhausted, but if I don’t get it out now, it won’t get written, so I’ll write while the tub fills up, and then we’ll go soak away the aches and pains. We do that a lot, lately. That tub almost belongs in our list of handy farm equipment,

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Frank still thinks I’m nuts, but I worked my tail off today putting in that new bed where the lilacs I planted aren’t going to make it. I think it is probably twenty feet long, and it entailed much digging up of sod and dirt, hauling of much crap, and generally hard, physical labor. I

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We’ve been going slow on adding garbage to give the worm population time to build up, but we seem to be okay now. We’ve got the second bin about half full of garbage, and it’s just squirming with worms. We also got a quart of worm tea for the houseplants. The first bin still has a bunch of worms in it, which is good because the coir bedding that came with the bin still has a lot of decomposing to do. I suspect we didn’t add enough garbage, because that seems to be gone. I’m taking this as meaning that we can now start putting all our garbage in there, which is great since it means I won’t have to go out to the compost pile in the snow. The downside seems to be the flies. They’re there there, and the manual for the composter pretty much implies they’re a normal feature. Oh well.

I haven’t been too happy with our worm bins. (From Magic Worm Ranch). The drain seems to stop up, the worms don’t seem to thrive, and harvesting the worm castings takes an hour or so of manually fishing out worms. After looking around, I bought a Worm Factory from Composters.com. It’s a five bin tower. You keep putting kitchen scraps and roughage (shredded paper for us) into the top bin. Hopefully by the time you get all five bins filled the worms have finished with everything yummy in the bottom bin, and moved on. So you empty the bottom bin and make it the top. Meanhile, there’s a reservoir with a spigot in the base, which accumulates the worm tea. We harvested the existing bins, getting a couple gallons of castings and just shy of a pound of worms which went into the new bin. I’ve got high hopes that this setup will work better.

Whew, it’s hot out there. I am not, however, complaining. We’ve had so much rain (almost 8 inches so far this month alone) that I haven’t been able to really do much in the garden, so I’ll take hot over hot and raining any day. We went out into the garden pretty early this morning,

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It’s hard to believe that this is my first real deadheading run on the window boxes, but I don’t think the boxes themselves really took off until the cold and rainy June weather stopped. So once hot and sunny July started, we got a couple of weeks of gorgeous growth on the whole set, but

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We got a paper shredder last weekend, to add to our composting project, and Frank is having much fun making all our junk mail become fodder for our soon to be improved soil. And because we now have all this paper, which will overwhelm the compost bin, we headed back into town again this evening to get more coffee grounds. What? We are so not obsessive about projects we get into. Perfectly normal, we are. It’s been really warm, lately, the typical February thaw, though rainy. I hate to see all the brown ground that’s starting to show up, though none in our yard yet. Supposedly some more snow is on the way tonight, though nothing to write home about.